Current Kudos For Privatization Much Ado About Nothing

DENIS HORGAN

September 27, 1995|By DENIS HORGAN; Courant Columnist

More efficient? Sure, we all want the government to be more efficient. But I'm not sure I want the Internal Revenue Service to be any more efficient than it already is. A little government clumsiness in rooting out my last farthing is not always a bad thing. Hey, give us a fighting chance to beat the system.

The Republicans want private companies to play in the tax collecting game. It's the same old song: Private companies can do things better than the slugs and lizards on the government payroll. This from distinguished people who have spent a professional lifetime on the government payroll themselves, of course.

I hadn't much noticed that the IRS was all that inefficient in the first place. They've been pretty good at squeezing the lemon of my sour finances. (Actually, recently they sent me a cold and crisp chastisement that I had paid too much taxes, catching a mathematical blunder on my part. I took the chastisement -- and the refund -- with humble good grace.)

However, congressional Republicans say the executive branch IRS has done a bum job, which they blame on the Democrats, as always. (Martians, of course, were in the executive branch White House from 1969- 1977 and 1981-1993.) They say the agency is behind on its collections and, of course, they say this at a time when they are cutting its budget.

Well, if they think that there are billions out there for the collecting, most likely it won't be from nickel-and-dime chumps like you and me; if the Republicans want to be more efficient tracking down the slippery rich and big business, that's fine with your pal, Denis. Go get 'em.

But another thing I don't much get is the basic idea that the private sector is all that perfect in the first place. Or second place.

Put aside the trifling question of whether you want any old jamoke from a private company prowling through your personal finance files. Put that aside and wonder: Exactly which business are we talking about as the paragon of efficiency?

Except for gargantuan executive salaries, where are these great accomplishments that we hear so much about?

Would we bring to bear on clumsy government that wondrous Swiss clock efficiency of, say, the banking industry? Taxes? They'd apply a billion fees instead. In dreaming up new fees, anyway, they are efficient; in just about everything else, if the collapses, mergers and failures say anything, they don't offer anything much better than Lucy and Ethel working the candy company assembly line.

Might the scam-artists and thousand-dollar-toilet-seat crowd of the aerospace pirates be expected to do a better job than the poor, overworked, maligned civil servants who exist as punching bags for the rest of us? Maybe the gentle sensitivity of the lords of insurance would be better. What a joke.

Exasperated by numb-eyed government clerks, would we trade that in for their counterparts in, say, the big department stores or supermarkets? Possibly we might come to think it is the work, not the source of the paycheck, that inspires such performances.

But I miss the point. The point is to hammer the government worker as some fashion of subhuman quite incapable of doing a job well. Folks are falling all over themselves to get into government so they can savage government. People who haven't taken a dime except a government dime over long careers assure us that the government is run less efficiently than the vaunted private sector. We go bananas when some sad sack government type washes his car on government time but dismiss as not worthy of note the bloat, extravagance and mismanagement of so many of our private enterprises.

Possibly it all might have a bit more credibility if Congress moved to privatize itself, too. Let's bring the legendary skills and efficiencies of big business to the making of laws and rules, posturing and posing, huffing and puffing, cranking out the pork with one hand while belaboring it with the other. There's a prospect to imagine. Actually, you could wonder who it would be that would take the miserable job on the private side and who would do it better. Maybe there, at least, they couldn't do it any worse.